Smart grid security certification in Europe : challenges and recommendations

Security and privacy issues are of major concern for smart grid users. For this reason, vendors should ensure that these two features follow smart grid devices for their whole life cycle; from the design to the decommission phase. Certification is not only a means to provide assurance to the smart gird users that security and privacy have been taken into account but also to create trust to the entire smart grid supply chain. This report provides insight on security certification of smart grids. It contains information about several certification approaches; it describes the specific European situation, discusses the advantages and challenges and provides recommendations to involved stakeholders towards a more harmonised European smart grid security certification practices framework. The report describes the need for harmonised European smart grid certification practices which cover the complete smart grid supply chain, and are supported by a European platform based on M/490 SGAM (Smart Grid Architecture Model) and the concept of smart grid chain of trust. Part of this report is the analysis of the available security certification schemes for smart grids and the approaches used in Europe. This way we have generated an overview that depicts which certification schemes can be used to create this chain of trust. During this analysis it came up that there is not a single, existing, scheme that can cover the entire chain of trust, and that not all parts of the chain can be completely covered for every smart grid use-case. Additionally, it appeared that there are multiple initiatives in different Member States that take different approaches to achieve the same goal. For this reason, we use the common denominator of the features of the different existing certification standards in order to introduce a certification meta-scheme for the smart grids in Europe.